1 week to go

Yes, a long time in the planning and its now just one week to our Researching a Career hub at Esomar's 2015 Congress in Dublin.

If you are attending, please pop along and see how you can get involved. If you can't make it, keep visiting the blog to keep in touch with developments.

10 days to go!

Yes  - just 10 days to the start of the Esomar Congress - meet the the team, read the report and get involved.

And don't worry if you are not going, we'll bring regular updates on the blog right here!

Meet one of the members of our team

Yes, as we get ready to launch our story of the industry, we thought we would give you a sneak preview of some of the characters that will feature.

First I'll introduce a character I've called Larry - he's very industrious and enjoys the variety his job involves!

Keep popping back to our blog in the coming days to meet some more characters and learn more about the innovative story we have developed.

Meet the Researching a Career team at ESOMAR's 2015 congress in Dublin

Yes, following the success of our careers hub at MRS Impact 2015, we have been asked to attend ESOMAR's event this September in Dublin.

As well as meeting the team, you'll have a chance to share your experiences and get involved in our developing activity plan. We are also talking about some of the results but as the theme of the event is Revelations, we can't tell you anymore at this point! You'll have to come along and see for yourself.

For more details about Congress, visit https://www.esomar.org/events-and-awards/events/global-and-regional/congress-2015/congress-2015_overview.php

Volunteers needed to take part in University presentations

One of the key activities we have highlighted (and was the clear winner in our MRS Conference vote) for the industry to help improve how it promotes itself to potential entrants was increasing the amount of proactive engagement it conducts with potential entrants.

As we reported last week, the MRS is starting to roll out a ramped up University engagement programme during this academic year, and its looking for volunteers.

Please visit https://www.mrs.org.uk/careers/graduate_roadshows to find out more details and how you can get involved.

MRS & AQR Graduate Roadshows - more details

Further to our short post last week, here are a few more details about this exciting development and how you can get involved.

For a while now Trish & Ken Parker have been running some roadshows at universities to help promote the profile of research as a career. To date they have visited and presented to over 20 universities. However following one of the main findings of our researching a career was to gain more exposure at universities, the programme is to be ramped up with the aim of reaching 100 universities a year.

To do this we need to gain support from people across the industry to get involved to help make this happen. Whether it be in a senior role to help introduce the session and set out some of the key messages that our project has identified through to middle and junior level people that can share their personal experiences.

The aim is not to make participation onerous and we would hope if lots of people commit to do a single event then we can really make a difference - if you can do more, that would be brilliant!

So if you are interested in challenging perceptions, expanding on what is great about our industry, the variety, innovation and impact on strategy then please drop your details to membership@mrs.org.uk and they will contact you to discuss how you can help.

Great News - MRS & AQR Graduate Roadshow

We have just received notification that following our project running the career hub at this years MRS conference and the fantastic reaction and support its findings & outputs received, the MRS and AQR will be expanding their university graduate roadshow programme.

We'll share more details with you all on Monday and how you can get involved. 

Have a great weekend

What's in a title?

An interesting area of conversation that came out from our discussions at the MRS conference concerned job titles.

Some people felt that different titles represent different levels of responsibilities in different organisations. This makes its hard to identify a clear career path through the industry.

Add to that the changing titles that some organisations and agencies are now using and its not surprising that young people entering the industry feel confused.

Therefore, one of the key learnings we need to consider as we develop our "Story of our Industry", is how we set out the variety of career paths that can be followed.

We are starting to get our ideas together and are looking to develop a campaign approach to help make this happen - keep watching the blog for more info.

MRS 2015 Conference Poll - Which 'next steps' should be the priorities?

Throughout the conference we ran a poll on our hub where we asked people to vote for their top 3 next steps for the project to tale, based on the many different ideas we have captured during the year or so of us gathering evidence.

We received 240 votes across 10 different options - we also allowed people to flag up their own ideas, some of which made it to our cartoon wall.

This is how the results look:-

In the coming weeks we are looking to discuss these results with a number of industry bodies and representatives to galvanise activity and get people involved. Watch thsi space for more details of how you can help.

Another cartoon theme

At the conference, one of the common themes we heard from delegates related to the sheer variety of roles that careers in our industry offer as well as the opportunity to involved in really important projects - here are a couple of images that were generated around this theme:-

It's clear that as part of our next steps of setting out what the story of our industry is, these are important aspects that we will need to incorporate and highlight for potential new joiners looking for a varied and exciting career.